Vagabonds

Roberto Bolaño and his fractured masterpiece.

Even when Bolaño’s work became canonical, he railed against the literary mainstream and its enthusiasm for magic realism.Credit RICCARDO VECCHIO

“And then I never saw him again”: this phrase recurs with eerie frequency in the work of the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolaño, who died four years ago, in Barcelona, at the age of fifty. In Bolaño’s ten novels and three story collections—all completed in his torrential final decade, before he succumbed to a chronic liver ailment that he suspected would seal his fate—characters go through life in a state of agitated migration. They sever friendships, quit jobs, abandon apartments without giving notice, skip the return flight home, assume new identities, flee combustive love affairs, cut off ties to everyone they have ever known, head off into the desert, simply disappear. Relationships, in Bolaño’s world, tend to be febrile but fleeting, yielding memories suffused by the afterglow of emotion; his narratives are often the testimonies of people the wanderers leave behind. It’s no coincidence that Bolaño’s most heartbreaking creation—the rebellious, doomed poet at the heart of his 1998 masterwork, “The Savage Detectives,” which Farrar, Straus has just published in translation—is named Ulises.

Bolaño, who was born in Santiago in 1953 (“the year that Stalin and Dylan Thomas died,” as he noted in an essay), led a life that was itself marked by uprootedness. His father’s job was to roam: he was a truck driver. His mother was a teacher. When Bolaño was a child, he and his family shuttled between towns in Chile, and then, in 1968, they moved to Mexico City. Bolaño found the dislocation exhilarating: his new home, he later recalled, was “a vast, almost imaginary place where freedom and metamorphosis were a daily spectacle.” By this time, he had developed an appetite for literature so ravenous that it practically outstripped that of his idol, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Like Borges, Bolaño consumed everything from arcane poetry to dime-store fiction. Unlike Borges, he stole most of his books.

Bolaño, who was dyslexic, didn’t enjoy the classroom, and he dropped out of high school, devoting himself to poetry. During the late sixties, mass demonstrations erupted frequently on Mexico City’s streets, and Bolaño revelled in the political ferment. He became a Trotskyist and travelled to El Salvador, where he befriended leftist poets who carried guns alongside their notebooks.

In the summer of 1973, he went back to Santiago, hoping to join a leftist revolution that had taken hold in Chile, with the election of a Socialist government. That September, Augusto Pinochet launched his coup. Bolaño became a spy for the resistance. He was a feeble conspirator—charged with transmitting messages between dissidents, he felt pathetically conspicuous as he bicycled along Santiago’s emptied-out streets—but the experience thrilled him. “I recall the days after the coup as rich ones, full of energy, full of eroticism, days and nights in which anything could happen,” he once wrote. (Photographs of him from this period show a handsome but malnourished-looking hippie: his wavy black hair was untended, and his delicate eyes were not yet dominated by the ovoid glasses that he adopted in middle age.)

Soon after the coup, Bolaño was stopped at a highway checkpoint. His accent had mutated during his years abroad, and the police booked him as a “foreign terrorist.” Bolaño was detained for eight days, and perhaps would have been killed—Pinochet’s regime murdered many dissident writers—were it not for a bizarre reversal of the kind that animates his fiction. One day, a prison guard walked up to Bolaño and said, “Don’t you remember me? I’m your buddy.” The two men had briefly attended high school together; Bolaño was promptly released. After four more months in Chile—a whirl of “black humor, friendship…and the danger of death”—Bolaño realized that he had written only one poem, and that it wasn’t any good.

He returned to Mexico City in 1974. At a café on Calle Bucareli—Mexico City’s Left Bank—Bolaño met Mario Santiago, a defiant, acidly intelligent poet of Indian extraction. The two men, along with a dozen or so friends, formed a band of literary guerrillas, whom Bolaño christened the infrarealistas. The group’s aesthetic, Bolaño later said, was French Surrealism fused with “Dadaism, Mexican style.” They published iconoclastic magazines and engaged in myriad forms of provocation, such as shouting out their own poems at readings given by their “enemies” in Latin America’s cultural establishment—in particular, Octavio Paz, the poet who eventually became Mexico’s first Nobel Laureate. Another prominent Mexican writer, Carmen Boullosa, has spoken of her “fear,” before approaching a lectern, that infrarealistas might be lurking in the audience: “They were the terror of the literary world.”

Bolaño’s fury toward the literary mainstream—deeply felt and bordering on puerile—endured even after his own work became canonical. (At a convocation of writers in Seville, Spain, six weeks before Bolaño died, he was declared to be the most influential Latin-American writer of his generation.) Bolaño is notorious in Spanish-speaking countries for having proclaimed that magic realism “stinks.” He derided Gabriel García Márquez as “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops”; he called Isabel Allende a “scribbler” whose “attempts at literature range from kitsch to the pathetic.” (Allende, interviewed in 2003, dismissed Bolaño as an “extremely unpleasant” man, adding, “Death does not make you a nicer person.”) Bolaño’s obstreperousness was sometimes a pose—much like his preference for being photographed in a black leather jacket, sternly sucking on a cigarette—but his self-described “gratuitous attacks” had salutary effects. He helped liberate Latin-American writing from the debased imitations of magic realism that followed the global conquest of García Márquez’s 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”—all those clairvoyant señoritas and intercourse-inspiring moles—and reëstablished the primacy of such cosmopolitan experimentalists as Borges and Julio Cortázar. (For Bolaño, Cortázar’s moody novel “Hopscotch” was the Beginning and the End, precisely because it has neither a beginning nor an end.) Of course, some calculation lay behind his position. There was one living Latin-American novelist whose avid bookishness and formal cleverness made him the obvious heir to the modernist tradition: Roberto Bolaño.

Bolaño’s fiction is, in large part, an ironic mythologization of his personal history, and “The Savage Detectives” hews closest to what Latin-American writers call the Bolaño legend. The novel, which has been given a bracingly idiomatic translation by Natasha Wimmer, is a teeming, “Manhattan Transfer”-like collage featuring more than fifty narrators, but its first hundred pages are anchored by a single, exuberant voice—that of Juan García Madero, a seventeen-year-old Mexican orphan who, in 1975, abandons his college studies in Mexico City for a group of poet renegades known as the “visceral realists.”

Madero’s narration comes in the form of clipped, kinetic diary entries: “Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine”; “I’m reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.” Not since Rimbaud has the world of verse seemed so criminally seductive. Madero’s entrance into the poetry underground resembles the heady initiation of Ray Liotta’s fledgling mobster in “GoodFellas.” The visceral realists not only shoplift (Madero boasts that, in his “tenement room, a little library has already begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores”); they fund a magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by trafficking in Acapulco Gold marijuana. Yet the purpose of this illicit activity couldn’t be purer. “We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed,” Madero proclaims.

The visceral realists are led by Ulises Lima, a confrontational Mexican described by others as a “ticking bomb,” and Arturo Belano, a flinty Chilean expatriate who was briefly imprisoned by the Pinochet regime. They literally burst in on Madero’s world, interrupting an antiseptic poetry workshop that he attends. (With Madero and Belano, Bolaño, a lover of literary jokes, has managed to squeeze two versions of himself into the same novel.) Lima harangues the professor, and then pulls some “smudged, crumpled sheets from his jacket pocket,” reading what Madero calls “the best poem I’d ever heard.” Madero, emboldened, hurls insults of his own; after class, Lima and Belano usher him to a “grisly” bar on Calle Bucareli where moll-like waitresses offer blow jobs to aspiring writers, for a price (“I’d like you to write me a poem”). Madero makes the mobster metaphor explicit: “I worried that Belano and Lima were so busy talking to every freak that came up to our table that they’d forgotten all about me, but as day began to dawn, they asked me to join the gang. They didn’t say group or movement, they said gang. I liked that.” There is an element of parody here: Bolaño appreciates that there is something ridiculous about tough guys who quote Raymond Queneau. Yet, by grafting the tropes of gangster films onto the world of poetry, Bolaño captures the outlaw spirit that pervades every avant-garde movement.

Although the diaries form a kind of bildungsroman, Bolaño never presents Madero’s verse, as, say, James Joyce does with Stephen Dedalus in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” The omission is pointed: Bolaño wants to focus on the art of living. Madero’s entries have the offhand beauty of raw enthusiasm, particularly when taking account of his rambunctious sex life. Madero loses his virginity to María Font—a feral poet with hands “like the talons of a falcon”—and goes on a tear from there. He writes of one partner, “She arched as if a ghost were tickling her spine. I came three times. Later we went outside and bathed in the rain spilling over the stairwells.” Of another: “She tasted of cigarettes and expensive food. I tasted of cigarettes and cheap food. But both kinds of food were good.” In Bolaño’s work, vitality is poetry.

As Madero enters the inner circle of visceral realism, he discovers that the movement has a secret history. Lima and Belano have borrowed the group’s name from an equally uncompromising group of poets from the nineteen-twenties; one member, Cesárea Tinajero, particularly fascinates them. Tinajero’s verse was greatly admired by her compatriots, but it cannot be found in libraries. She seems to have vanished decades ago in the Sonora Desert, north of the city. Lima and Belano suspect that she is still alive. Just as the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami structures his dreamlike narratives around the search for a vanished girl, Bolaño’s fiction repeatedly features a noirish hunt for a missing writer. For Bolaño, whose protagonists are usually poets, the detective plot adds bounce to stories that might otherwise seem leadenly preoccupied with literary matters. The technique echoes that of Borges, whose oracular ficciones abound with private eyes.

Madero’s romp through Mexico City ends as Bolaño stories often do—suddenly. A house where the poets gather for a New Year’s Eve party is laid siege to. An armed pimp and his henchman park outside in a Camaro, demanding the return of Lupe, a prostitute—and a friend of María Font’s—who has tendered her resignation from whoring. The poets decide to resolve the standoff by peeling out of the driveway in a friend’s car; they will go to the Sonora Desert, in search of Tinajero. In the first section’s final diary entry, Madero presents a giddy action sequence worthy of “Starsky & Hutch”: “I saw the two thugs get out of the Camaro and I saw them coming at me.…I saw that Lupe was looking at me from inside the car and that she was opening the door. I realized that I’d always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close the door Ulises stepped on the gas.” Poets with their pedal to the metal: Vroom! Novelists have been smashing high and low together for a century, but Bolaño does it with the force of a supercollider.

While living in Mexico, Bolaño published two poetry collections, but, in 1977, a failed romance drove him to go abroad. “If I had stayed in Mexico I would have hanged myself,” he said. The infrarealists wilted without him. He spent a year travelling in France, Spain, and North Africa, then settled briefly in Barcelona, taking part in the “great sexual explosion” that convulsed Spain after the death of General Franco. Worried that the city’s allures were distracting him from poetry, he began a long, itinerant tour of the Mediterranean coast, taking on an absurd variety of jobs: grape harvester, dockworker, campground watchman, trinket-shop proprietor. In his spare time, he wrote lush, sentimental poems about his Mexican friends. Around this time, he printed up a visiting card identifying himself as “Roberto Bolaño, Poet and Vagabond.” His wanderings punished his body; he later joked that he left behind a trail of teeth, “like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs.” It didn’t help that he was becoming addicted to heroin.

The second part of “The Savage Detectives” offers a melancholy gloss on Bolaño’s nomadic period. Bolaño, having cut off Madero’s headlong narrative—the hunt for Cesárea Tinajero does not resume for four hundred pages—brings his story to a standstill. In the manner of Faulkner’s hazy oratorio “As I Lay Dying,” he introduces a disorienting array of new narrators: four dozen eyewitnesses, from the United States to Austria to Israel, who report on the wanderings of Lima and of Belano since 1975. (The reason for their exile is a mystery: something terrible seems to have happened in the Sonora Desert.) These accounts, each preceded by a journalistic dateline, resemble extended interviews—and reading them feels like combing through the unedited footage of a documentary. With so many overlapping perspectives, the resulting portraits of Lima and Belano have a Cubist ambiguity. Are the visceral realists ardent visionaries or drugged-out miscreants? It depends on who’s talking. After being immersed in the mind of an acolyte like Madero, readers may be startled by a judgment offered by an ex-girlfriend of Belano’s: “The whole visceral realism thing was…the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.” Of Belano, she says, “Deep down the guy was a creep.” This is a devilish game to play with an alter ego; Bolaño could have titled this novel “Self-Portrait in Fifty-three Convex Mirrors.”

Meanwhile, he gets to inhabit a wild range of narrative voices: a pompous Galician lawyer who calls Belano a “third-rate Julien Sorel”; a foulmouthed gringa who refers to one visceral realist as a “hemorrhoid-licking old bastard.” One of the most riveting speakers is Auxilio Lacouture, a garrulous Uruguayan woman who begins with a proclamation: “I’m the mother of Mexican poetry. I know all the poets and all the poets know me.” Lacouture, having known Belano since he was a teen-ager, gives the novel’s most detailed account of his imprisonment in Chile; in her view, his efforts against the Pinochet regime were noble but tainted him, as he returned to Mexico a preening radical who looked down on his old friends “as if he were Dante and he’d just returned from hell.” We also get a weirdly parallel tale of her own travails. Like Belano, who stumbled into the resistance movement against Pinochet, Lacouture was inadvertently trapped by history. In 1968, the National Autonomous University, in Mexico City—where Lacouture did various odd jobs—was overtaken by riot police. Ignoring megaphoned commands to evacuate the campus, Lacouture hid in a bathroom stall, terrified, for several days. (A compulsive poet, she scribbled fresh verse on toilet paper.) She presents her actions as bold protest:

I lifted my feet like a Renoir ballerina, my underwear dangling around my skinny ankles.…And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew I had to resist. So I sat on the tiled floor of the women’s bathroom and in the last rays of light I read three more poems by Pedro Garfias and then I closed the book and closed my eyes and said to myself: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, stand your ground.

The incident swallows her up, defining her life: “The legend spread on the winds of Mexico City and the winds of ’68, fusing with the stories of the dead and the survivors and now everybody knows that a woman stayed at the university when its freedom was violated.” Her monologue edges toward madness. To witness Lacouture’s full breakdown, the reader must turn to “Amulet,” a slim novel anchored by the same bathroom-stall revelation, which Bolaño published in 1999. (More than once, Bolaño generated entire novels from episodes in earlier ones.) In the end, the fleshed-out portrait of Lacouture in “Amulet”—New Directions recently published a translation—is less potent than the hypnotic ten-page cadenza in “Detectives,” which is enriched by its connection to other tales of political confusion.

The most haunting figure in “The Savage Detectives” is Ulises Lima. Upon leaving Mexico, the once fearless poet becomes an aimless “shadowy figure,” a “goddamn robot”; in this novel, exile offers not opportunity but enervation. When his forlorn odyssey is complete, Lima—having published nothing, his poems scrawled in the margins of books—returns home. He finally comes face to face with the despised Octavio Paz, who sits next to him on a park bench. The enemy, at last, within reach! But it’s soon humiliatingly clear that Paz has no idea who he is. Lima politely shakes Paz’s hand, his fire extinguished.

Near the end of this middle section, a visceral realist proclaims, “The search for a place to live and a place to work was the common fate of all mankind.” Ulises never finds one. Neither did the man he was based on: as Bolaño notes in an essay, his old friend Mario Santiago died in a “mysterious” car crash the same year that “The Savage Detectives” was published. “When an ambulance came to pick up his body,” Bolaño recalled, “nobody knew who he was and he spent several days in the morgue without anyone claiming him.” Santiago’s one poetry collection, “The Swan’s Howl,” is no longer in print.

The sense of creative atrophy that permeates “The Savage Detectives” was belied by Bolaño’s own life: his literary output accelerated and deepened the closer he got to death. In the mid-eighties, he settled in Blanes, a tourist town on Spain’s Costa Brava. He stopped using heroin. (A moving essay recounts his detoxification: he got his methadone dose at noon and spent the rest of the day lying on the beach, crying.) He married Carolina López, a Catalonian. In 1990, the couple had a son, Lautaro, named after the Mapuche leader who resisted the Spanish conquest of Chile; they later had a daughter, Alexandra. Fatherhood changed Bolaño. Determined to make a proper living, he largely abandoned poetry, shifting to prose. In interviews, Bolaño never dwelled on the bitterness that must have attended this decision, but the tragic thrust of “The Savage Detectives” suggests that he never forgave the world for making him abandon his first love.

Bolaño began submitting short stories to state-sponsored contests around Spain; when a story won prize money, he would retitle it and submit it to another competition, which it would also win. (Similar mischief is detailed in his darkly witty story “Sensini.”) When he was thirty-eight, Bolaño learned that his liver was severely compromised, and he began writing with unrelenting concentration; starting in 1996, he published one or more books a year. Despite his declining health, he could write for forty-eight hours at a stretch before collapsing. Such was his intensity, friends have recalled, that he sometimes missed medical appointments.

Compared with the sprawling “Savage Detectives,” most of Bolaño’s novels are impressively distilled performances; seven are under two hundred pages. Two of his best short works, “By Night in Chile” (2000) and “Distant Star” (1996), have also been published by New Directions. “By Night in Chile” may be Bolaño’s most searing monologue: a Chilean priest, on his deathbed, attempts to justify a shameful past. In order to escape his impoverished background, he reveals, he joined Opus Dei, and eventually served as a tutor for General Pinochet. (There’s a nauseating scene in which Pinochet coerces the priest into praising his writerly gifts: “I’ve published countless articles in journals…on all sorts of topics, but always of course related to military matters.”) “Distant Star” handles similar themes, but is more surreal in tone. An ambitious Chilean poet, Carlos Wieder, comes up with a scheme for getting ahead in the Pinochet regime. He becomes a pilot in the Chilean Air Force and turns the publication of verse into a hideous military spectacle—by skywriting his latest stanzas over the Andes. Wieder’s poems are incoherent, but the state applauds them as patriotic emblems of the New Chilean Poetry. A literary crime, in Bolaño’s world, is the equivalent of a political crime, and Wieder, inevitably, turns out to be a murderer: two superior poets become victims of his jealousy and his knife. Wieder vanishes into exile when Pinochet falls, and, as with “The Savage Detectives,” this disappearance inspires a search: the narrator, a friend of the murdered poets, pieces together clues and hunts Wieder down.

Bolaño’s first novels attracted critical praise but few readers; the 1998 publication of “The Savage Detectives” made him instantly famous. It aroused the same level of excitement in Latin America that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” had, three decades earlier, and won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the Spanish-language equivalent of the Booker Prize. Although Bolaño claimed to be embarrassed by his renown, he couldn’t resist sharing his caustic—and macho—opinions in interviews and essays. (In the late nineties, he began writing a column for a Spanish newspaper.) Not since Norman Mailer had a novelist chest-thumped so entertainingly. Literature, he declared, “is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.” When asked by the Mexican edition of Playboy to name his favorite things, he cited “the literature of Borges” and “making love.” He said that the Nobel Prize was typically won by “jerks.” Bolaño played up his hippie past, claiming to have lived for years on “a diet of rice.” Despite the diaspora evoked in “The Savage Detectives,” he rejected the idea that his work was a “literature of exile.” He wrote, “For a true writer, his only homeland is the bookstore.” He still considered himself primarily a poet: “I blush less when I reread my poems.”

Growing increasingly ill, he worked for five years on his final, hugely ambitious project: “2666,” conceived as five discrete but linked narratives. In June, 2003, he confessed to a Spanish publication, “I’m not capable of doing the work that finishing ‘2666’ requires. There are more than a thousand pages that I have to correct—it’s a labor worthy of a nineteenth-century miner. For now, I’m going to do less taxing work. I will correct the novel after I have my liver operation.…I am third on the list to receive a transplant.” He died a month later.

In the days before his death, Bolaño asked his editor to publish the five sections of “2666” individually, in order to secure a sizable inheritance for his children. After consultation with Bolaño’s wife, the publisher issued it as a single volume. (The book, which is eleven hundred pages long, is currently being translated by Wimmer.) “2666” has hundreds of characters, but in a sense its protagonist is Santa Teresa, a town in the Sonora Desert where impoverished Mexicans labor in maquiladoras, the low-wage factories that have proliferated in the era of globalization. Santa Teresa is modelled on Ciudad Juárez, where, since 1993, the corpses of more than four hundred young women—many of them mutilated—have been found in garbage containers or vacant lots. (Almost none of these crimes have been solved.) In the novel, a parallel massacre has taken place. The plot of “2666” is byzantine—in a variation on “The Savage Detectives,” it hinges on the hunt for a reclusive Prussian novelist who, admirers believe, has hidden himself in the Sonora Desert. But, at its core, “2666” is a testament to the unredressed evil of the murders. The fourth section, “The Part About the Crimes,” offers a sickeningly comprehensive account of the killings, written in the frigid tone of a forensic report. This litany is interspliced with accounts of corrupt police officials, one of whom jokes, “Women are like laws, they were made to be violated.” More than three hundred pages long, it may be the grimmest sequence in contemporary fiction.

In one of several poems that Roberto Bolaño wrote about Mario Santiago, he speaks of “the dream of our youth / the most valiant dream of all.” The third and final section of “The Savage Detectives”—in which Madero’s diaries seamlessly resume, on New Year’s Day, 1976—has the feel of a dream. After the slow climb of the middle section, Bolaño rewards the reader with an exhilarating rush of storytelling. Lima and Belano turn out to be natural sleuths: clues about Tinajero’s past are uncovered as they motor from one dusty pueblo to another. People fall in love; a second car chase ends in a climactic shoot-out. The Technicolor glory of the book’s opening is restored. At the same time, the brilliance of the novel’s temporal shuffling becomes clear: now that the reader knows how woeful the lives of the poets will become, their adventure in the Sonora Desert is freighted with dreadful poignancy. Madero’s diaries are not the beginning of something; they are the end.

Bolaño called “The Savage Detectives” a “love letter” to his generation, but it feels more like a lament, a chronicle of dissipated potential. The novel’s fetishization of lost youth verges on romanticism; a friend of Tinajero’s intones, “What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.” Outside the Madero diaries, there is only one moment in “The Savage Detectives” that documents a prolonged surge of passion. Late in the second section, Belano takes up residency in Spain. He becomes so peeved by a local book critic that a letter to the editor seems insufficient: he proposes a duel. Belano asks a friend to be his second, and the friend—a moribund fellow who is narrating this tale—is galvanized. “I felt as if someone had given me a shot in the arm,” the friend writes. “First the pinprick, then the liquid going not into my veins but my muscles, an icy liquid that made me shiver. The proposition seemed crazy and unwarranted.…But then I thought that life (or the spectre of life) is constantly challenging us for acts we never committed, and sometimes for acts that we’ve never thought of committing.” Belano and the critic obtain swords and agree to meet at a properly atmospheric spot: a wind-whipped beach north of Barcelona. But in Bolaño’s ever-darkening universe, a tragic trajectory cannot so easily be reversed. The ensuing swordplay is “hopelessly ridiculous,” the folly of men “going at it like stupid children.” The decisive blow has been struck by the author.

The duel sequence has the heightened dolorousness of Bolaño’s best short stories. When “The Savage Detectives” was published, Ignacio Echevarría, Spain’s most prominent literary critic, praised it as “the kind of novel that Borges could have written.” He got it half right. Borges, whose longest work of fiction is fifteen pages, would likely have admired the way Bolaño’s novel emerges from a branching tree of stories. But what would he have made of the delirious road trip, the frenzied sex, the sloppy displays of male ego? Bolaño fills his canvas with messy Lawrencian emotions but places them within a coolly cerebral frame. It’s a style worthy of its own name: visceral modernism. ♦

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